Isn't this war of magic and not war of city builders?   Magic is the focus, I would hope.  I've not waited all these months for a civ knockoff with magic added.  I'm afraid I'm not savvy enough to know exactly what it should look like or how it would work, but I would not want to spend alot of time with city stuff. 

Well, magic is "one" focus, not "the" focus. There is no "the" focus in a game that is one-half strategy game and one-half RPG (hence the current thread debate & the "hero" vs "squad" debate & the "epic" scale debate, etc, etc, etc)

And that's something they need to fix too. IMO the game needs a focus, the one thing that it does indepth and does really well. The other pieces are there to support and drive that.

The development team simply isn't big enough to do everything in detail at once.

I think lots of ppl are too negative here. Sanitation can give interesting choices. If you lack sanitation it can slow growth as already mentioned, but it could also attract animals like giant rats, sewer snakes or what not. If you have good sanitation you could cet positive quests that will give great rewards (build aquaduct and a waterfestival will attract more people), and if you lack it you could get more negative ones (kill the rat packs in city radius or population will go down by a few people every turn). Lots of other things could be added too. It doesnt all have to be simple numbers or choices. Make cities more living and unique.

Sanitation just for the hell of it is a silly idea.
It must have an actual influence on the game and the cost / upkeep of the building must be in the same range as the benefit you get from it. Otherwise there is no choice and the building becomes either useless or dumb micromanagement because you must have it.

Effects are easy to come up with so why doesn't anyone bother?

Base healing rate in a city without sewers is -10 to +15 %,  -1 % per city level.  Units can actually get sick and die in such a city.

Random chance for plagues to break out.

Random chance for 0 food production for one turn.

Random chance for newly trained units to be sickly, permanently having -10% hit points.

Higher chance of criminal elements, reducing gold income of the city. (wretched hive of scum and villainy)

Reduced morale of units stationed / defending there.

Random chance for a unit to receive a "disease" debuff, costing a small amount of HP for several turns.

Lower population growth.

Lower influence. (stench doesn't count!)

Sanitation, hospitals, fire brigades, police, secret service, schools, donut shops, it's all good. However, Elemental is not purely a civ city building game. The main focus is, or at least should be, magic and the war of magic. Otherwise, the main focus should be city building. I don't think you can have both as a primary focus in the game without losing out on the magic side.

To put this in perspective, I want to prepare my empire in such a way that allows me to storm my enemies with epic magical units and epic spells of devastation. With this mind-frame, taking care of lower level civil infrastructure becomes a tedious obstacle that is not in-line with my goals. In other words, the creation of a problem and it's solution to add an additional step that is largely unrelated to the greater purpose.

At the moment, you have certain paths to victory, each with their own related areas of research, and each with their own related improvements. These technologies and improvements advance you towards your desired goal. This streamlined format gives the game focus and direction. When you start adding in features that are not closely connected to the paths of purpose, you have a game that is all over the place, and can't seem to decide what it wants to be.

So, I think it would be fairer to call Elemental an Empire Building game rather than a Civilization Building game, as it tends to focus more on the grander purposes, giving less attention to the more mundane necessities of actual civilizations.

The problem is, you can't have both. What would you have the "focus" be?

The game was designed to be both a strategy game and a RPG. Focusing only on one will degrade the other. You can't just have "magic" otherwise why build armies or city improvements? Can't have just armies, otherwise why hire heroes?

For better or worse, this is a 50/50 game. I think that both elements can be improved upon (hell just about everything can be improved upon in its current state), but you can't have a focus "winner". 

As its own metric, sanitation is likely to be an annoyance that people who do not want to play a city builder do not want. For a mod it would be fine to have effects specific to it, but for the core game it should only be applied abstractly, if at all. The reason cities need sanitation / health services is to support a large population, which is what food does in the game. As food is already fairly abstracted (and is consumed by buildings), lets have sanitation buildings make the housing you already have be more effective, simulating the fact that things like sewers allow you to cram more people into a small space. There could be other bonuses for specific types of 'health' buildings, such as increased healing rate for units and increased population growth.

It does seem like there's a near complete absence of trade-offs when it comes to settlement improvements. The only apparent questions are whether you want to try to make a site large or spend that food on another site's pop growth.

But then I'm typing that with no real idea how the post 1.1 versions will play out...

p.s. Re sanitation: some folks might call it stupid micro stuff, but it really does seem like an aesthetic/historical gap if nothing else. Folks rant all the time about how Rome ruled with roads and steel-armed legions, but the aqueducts and public baths were just as essential to their civilization. So far, all the Elemental factions seem like stinky barbarians in comparison. Even New Pariden, and Procipinee just seriously seems like a ruler who'd appreciate regular baths for staff and retainers as much as for herself.

This was actually supposed to be a successor to Master of Magic. So I'd put the focus on doing that. Which means most of the complexity is going to be in the magic and warfare areas, with the other stuff there to drive those. That doesn't make for a necessarily simple economy, but it means the game is NOT a city builder.

You can't have a 50/50 game with the resources available to build it. That just means both of them are going to be inferior.

Methinks that you're drastically underestimating the value of hybrids. TV shows, restaurants, novels, and films all have strong 'hybrid' examples. Why not TBS games?

Mind you, I'm the original NotMoM guy, so I very much appreciate complaints that Elemental has strayed far from its aspiration to be MoM's "spiritual successor." But I'm a very greedy user, so I want to have my cake and eat it to. Without needing to eat mods.

Especially given Brad's increasingly frequent talk about multi-threading, I don't see any reason for a game NOT to have multiple focii. The real rub is that the devs need to learn how to provide inobtrusive AI support for players who want to largely ignore a given focus, and so far Elemental completely lacks anything like a trainable royal council or whatever.

Now that is something that sounds interesting to add to the game.

Maybe. But this isn't a new game. It's an overhaul of an existing one. I don't think there's another two years to get it right. With limited time, limited developer numbers, and a lot of things that need doing, I think the chances of success increase drastically if you pick a focus and make the game really good at that. Trying to do more things at once then you have the capacity to do just results in weak implementations across the board, and a game that excels at something is better then a game that's mediocre at everything.

Multithreading is great in that it lets you use a lot more complex math and lets the AI do more things at once, because of those extra processors. But user attention doesn't multithread. If you're going to take Dawn of Discovery's production system, add in quests as complicated as something like The Witcher, throw in a spell selection as good as MoM, and pile a sophisticated combat system on top of that, you're going to be demanding that users pay attention to a very high number of things at once.

While some hardcore types would certainly love that, you're also going to chase off a lot of people who simply either can't keep track of that many complex systems at once, or only find some of them fun and can't tolerate the slog through the rest of them.

Incidentally, if I said that I'd be alright with quests disappearing entirely so attention can be devoted to adding depth (and yes, complexity) to the other parts, would I get lynched?

Units already receive an additional healing bonus when garrisoned within your city on top of the bonus from being within your zone of influence.

Maybe supply trains for healing troops stationed outside friendly borders would be the solution.

They heal slowly, and if they have hundreds and hundreds of damage to heal, you might as well forget about them.

In the physical world, I surely hope not. Here on the boards, you'd put me solidly on the fence. I'd need to be very pleased with improvements in other areas to make up for my dashed hopes about how quests in Elemental could help the eventual GC3 escape the victory=genocide problem that GC and GC2 have. Given that the Master Quest is a 'new' game-ending condition, I'd definitely be willing to give it up if the payback was a game that put the non-warmonger strategies on equal footing with the shoot-first-ask-later crowd.

You'd still have the Spell of Making.

It'd probably also be possible to create an economic/science victory condition by having some very highly developed cities and gaining the knowledge to construct a new Forge of the Overlords, rather then having to cast one into existence.

(And yes, I meant an online lynching. )

I'll go with the same idea that GW Swicord said: if it's only to take out an option, defenitly no. Originaly, it's a multi-ending game and there is already enough focus on the warfare side of the game. If you cut even more, the only viable and fun way to play your game will be warfare so adventure and diplomacy will disapear. I don't want that. I dont want a "go to war to win" type of game, there is a lot of those outhere. I agree to add more depth to the game, I agree to have a "main focus" or a "global idea" for the game, but I dont want another war type game with only some other "thing" attach to it to make it less build an army and kill your ennemy. I prefer some long pace gameplay. So, if I was "balancing" thing out, I would add some more tech or option to win the game without having to make a huge army. I know that you said add depth and complexity to other area, but it's not depth and complexity that the other area need, it's an overhaul. By the way, I'm not angry, I'm passionate

Edit: I dont know why my message is all linked but it's not intended.

At some population the city prestige could be lowered and some sanitation buildings could be raised to counter the effect. The buildings should have some kind of upkeep.. but with all global resources that would be just annoying 'another building'.

In my opinion 'health' is kinda a ironic topic to try and address in for a game at the technology level of the middle ages.  (i.e. a time where little to nothing was known about health.  They did not really have medicine the way modern things do, and they didn't really have the kind of sanitation concerns like what comes from an industrial society with burning coal and such.

Not a required feature for this game in my opinion.  In fact I feel it would break the focus/style of the game more than it would add to city management.

Plagues and such should be the result of events and/or magic, not technology.  And study of medicine should result in higher population growth, not the balancing of health factors.  (public baths, for example, would improve prestige and population growth.   not 'help sanitation')

Screw sanitation and screw city builders. This is a STRATEGY FANTASY WARGAME you IGMO's. We don't need no stinkin (pun intended) toilets or sewers or wastewater treatment plants in this game. If you want that CRAP go play SIM CITY any edition. That's the problem with a LOT of games today they try to put TOO MUCH MICROMANGEMENT into them and they become dull and boring. I want to play the good stuff. Creating armies and fighting battles and discovering hidden treasure....that's a STRATEGY FANTASY WARGAME!

I would agree with you if conquest was the only victory condition or if the game were more heavily focused around combat. As it is combat is fairly simple and conquest is only one of several different ways to win. While sanitation is not the first thing I would implement if I could, I think that discussions about city management are important to improving the cookie cutter feeling of cities

Well, having some building that reflect some level of "sanitation" (I don't know why people think about micromanaging, it will only give BONUS and you dont manage your city, you build it and forget it) I would like to know what you consider micromanaging in this game?

In fact, the red cross was funded in the medieval time by the knigth in the field. Don't forget that the lore is there was some really big city BEFORE the cataclysm and we want to rebuild this empire.We've lost the technology but it didn't mean that we didn't have it. We don't know how far the technologie was before, but assuming that there was some really big magical city, it should had some "healing" place to help the big army (300 HP +) to recover faster than 5 HP/turn.In fact, if it was 5 HP/squad member it would greatly increase the speed of the game.

So, why wouldn't that fall under "improved housing"?  You can just pretend that sewage is included, and empire cities now smell sweet as can be.

"funded" in the medieval time?   to what are you referring?  Last I checked the Red Cross wasn't founded* until near the end of the 1800's which is certainly well after medieval times.  Also, Red Cross wasn't originally about giving medicine, it was about providing food and safety to wounded soldiers by removing them from the battlefield. So that does not contradict my statement at all, even if they were created in medieval times (brief scan of the first few pages on google's results for 'red cross history' supports that the were from the 19th century, not pre-17th century)

The concept of 'medical', 'civilians', or even 'clergy' on the battlefield and exempt from combat is a concept developed late in the Renaissance in Europe when formalized warfare was created (prior to that it was pretty much free game in terms of killing civilians or religious figures) so therefor red cross would not even work since they would have just been killed when trying to help the wounded.

I would totally be for a red cross organization that helped heal, increased population (because the people who don't die would thus have children in theory), or healing units away from the city during or following a battle.  I would NOT support it being used to help sanitation, since to this day that is not really their job. 

I liked the idea that the previous civilizations were very advanced, but apparently the cataclysm is now just the reason the game doesn't start with a bunch of cities (as apparently there were tons of people who survived it scattered among the hills and forests) so it would appear the only technology really lost involve magic and lost artifacts/dungeons/quests.